Letters to the Editor: The UN, Oslo, Obama and what Israel should do

The pogrom against Israel in the UN Security Council was definitely the final nail in the coffin of the Oslo Accords.

Rendering illegal all the Jewish towns and villages in Judea and Samaria, and Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem, goes totally against the principles of Oslo and, indeed, UN Resolution 242. The Palestinian Authority will have no incentive to negotiate with Israel until all Jewish people are ethnically cleansed from these areas – after all, if the land belongs to the Arabs, why would they want to come to the table? An ideal solution is to wait until after January 20 (no point in making outgoing US President Barack Obama take further action, which he might do anyway) and then apply sovereignty to Area C.

(“Annexation” is the wrong word; it means appropriation of land that one does not own, while Judea, Samaria and east Jerusalem are the heartland of Israel from time immemorial.) Hopefully, when the Trump administration takes over, it will defund the UN, which the institution highly deserves.

HILTON SHARE
Netanya

Barack Obama’s political sneak attack on Israel while on his way out the door as president represents the ultimate betrayal of an ally.

Despite his repeated assurances to Israel and its supporters that he “has Israel’s back,” the true nature of Obama’s betrayal has finally been revealed to be a bull’s eye drawn on Israel in order to fulfill his Islamic political agenda. Too bad the Jews who were fooled and voted for him didn’t realize this at the time.

IRA NOSENCHUK
Jerusalem

There are numerous theories as to why the Obama administration decided to support and perhaps initiate the fiercely anti-Israel resolution adopted by the UN Security Council. They range from Obama’s personal bias against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his personal bias in favor of the Palestinians, and, perhaps most of all, the deterioration of the importance of Israel to the increasingly assimilated American Jewish community.

What is glaringly absent from all the discussions is a plan for peace that the government of Israel needs to put on the table and lobby for internationally. It must be presented as a plan that would ultimately be supported by the majority of Israelis, and because Israel is a democracy, it should be developed and presented as such, as opposed to the Palestinian side, whose leadership doesn’t really know or care what their people might or might not agree to.

The majority of Israelis will undoubtedly insist upon the following basic conditions in any final agreement:

• Acceptance by the Palestinian leadership that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people
• Jerusalem remains undivided under Israeli rule
• The Temple Mount remains under full Israeli sovereignty, thereby giving Jews the right to pray at Judaism’s holiest site while guarantees are given to the Muslim world of unfettered access to worship in the Aksa Mosque
• Area C of Judea and Samaria, as well as the Jordan Valley, remain permanently under Israeli sovereignty, with full citizenship being offered to the Palestinian residents
• No return of so-called Palestinian refugees to anywhere inside sovereign Israeli territory.

These are clearly the minimum conditions that Israelis would need in any future deal that divides the land into two states. There are countless other issues that need to be discussed and resolved, but it’s time our government stood up and proclaimed what would be the basic, minimum terms of any deal.

The citizens of Israel need and deserve a government that is willing to stand up for the wishes of the majority on these crucial, existential issues.
YAACOV (MARVIN) STENGE
Jerusalem

APOLOGY “Thou shalt not oppress the convert” (Comment & Features, December 29) was written by both Avi Weiss and Marc Angel. The latter’s name was omitted from the byline due to an editing error, for which we apologize.

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